About

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Last Saturday was the annual Garden Festival at the Eko Temple where I performed with my Koto group. It was a really wonderful day!

I liked it so much because I spend a lot of time chatting with the other students and also with one of my friends who was so lovely and came to help us dressing up in Kimono! Thank you again, it was so amazing of you <333

I was wearing Kimono for the first time and it was sitting perfectly the 2 hours I had to wait for our performance, but when I sat down it got super messed up because I was sitting down in a complete wrong way and also walking wrong. Oh well at least most of the people at the festival don't have a clue about Kimonos so they didn't noticed xD

The concert was over too quickly haha, I'm always nervous at concerts but at the same time it makes so much fun, without performances I feel it's not worth to practise haha ^^'''

Yeah it was such a wonderful day and I was really sad it was over ;__;

Here is also a picture of my own Koto, I'm taking classes now for 1 year but I have my Koto since ~4 months.

Back in May was the Dokomi again and this year was the first time that I was a volunteer there! My main "job" was helping in the Maid Café in the kitchen and taking polaroid pictures. But I also already came on Thursday and Friday for a few hours each to help setting up the convention.

I could write much more but I think it's not so interesting and I already forgot a lot of things haha. I can just say overall it made a lot of fun, especially taking the polaroid pictures because you could directly interact with the guests and see how you bring them happiness (ok that maybe sound weird xD).

Actually the last few years I already thought about applying a volunteer and also applying as a Maid for the Maid Café, but I was unsure and too shy to do it. But now I think why haven't I done it earlier haha!

So here two pictures I stole from the Maid Café Facebook page, because I totally forgot to take any pictures!

Friday, September 21, 2018

In May was Japantag (Japan Day) in Düsseldorf again. I was sooo tiered in the morning because I worked hard to finish my Kimono Lolita (inspired) outfit. Luckily my dear friend picked me up in the morning with her car and usually on Japan Day I would just meet with my friends and stroll along the rhine promenade, but this time I had something else to do!

I play Koto (japanese harp) since several months and we had a small concert at the Eko Temple. I hadn't a lot of information about the concert before, so I invited my parents and also some friends there! I thought we would play a few pieces and then the people could try to play Koto, and I really wanted to show it to my parents and friends! However the concert turned out to be 1,5 hours and I played almost at the end, but my lovely friend waited until I played <3

Afterwards I wanted to eat lunch with my parents, but I totally forgot how full the city is at Japan Day! Actually the last years I never had a problem to find a place at a restaurant, but this year everywhere were looong lines! So we had to choose one quite empty restaurant which only had Ramen and soggy Karaage. But afterwards we ate the selfmade Matcha ice cream from Takumi which is really delicious!

I wanted to show the rhine promenade to my parents as well but damn my new Btssb shoes hurt soooooooo much and I made the mistake and didn't packed any comfortable shoes to change. I don't know why I always make this stupid mistake but now I swear to god from now on I will always pack my Rhianna bow sneakers, the shoes were so bad my feet hurt the whole damn night and my knee as well because I walked weirdly in them because of the pain T__T

Yeah so my Japan Day was short and painful but still I was happy that I could play Koto haha.

Here another picture of my skirt (worn on a different day but you can see the beautiful fabric better):

Friday, July 20, 2018

Last week it was time again for my annual Paris trip! This time I travelled by car with my friends Mabu and Johanna.

Day 1
We arrived in Paris Wednesday afternoon and our first stop was the Japan Expo because my friends wanted to prepare their booth. After quickly dropping our stuff at the hotel we went to the center of Paris. Since we were already very hungry we decided to eat dinner at the Hello Kitty café. Unfortunately since it already was quite late, everything hearty was sold-out and we only could order the Hello Kitty Tea Time. So we basically ate our dessert first but it was veeery delicous, everything tasted heavily of Matcha and 9€ was an affordable price for it.

Since our stomaches were still not satisfied we were searching around for a restaurant, but like all touristy spots in Paris they were all quite expensive, so we settled for an asian one and hoped for the best. I ordered a homemade mint lemonade and a black burger and it turned out delicious, even if it was overpriced (5€ for the lemonade and 18€ for the burger).

In the evening my friends still wanted to do a little sightseeing, so we visited Sacre Coeur. I really dislike this area of Paris because it's very dirty and has the most agressive tourist scammers, but it wasn't that bad this time.

Day 2
On Thursday it was finally time for the Japan Expo! I arrived half an hour before opening time and I was quite at the front of the line. When I finally could enter the venue my first stop was the Sailor Moon booth!! I have to admit I have never seen Sailor Moon, but I looove the cute merchandise, and there was a booth who sold the original stuff for veeery cheap! For example the tea cup and saucer costs 70€ in Japan but only 20€ at the booth!

Afterwards I went to the 'traditional area' where many japanese traditional artists are exhibiting and selling their work. That's what I love so much about the Japan Expo, that it covers all aspects of Japan, not only Anime&Manga. One booth offered to make a small Kanzashi flower and I wanted to try it! It cost 5€ which might have been a little expensive but I thought I really wanted to learn the technique and you support the artist as well.

I also took a look at many other things but I just want to list my highlight of the day which was the perfomance of Pikotaro! You may know him from the Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen song, and I managed to get a really good seat for the show, first row in the middle :D. His performance was only 15 minutes because he doesn't really have a lot of songs and they are very short, but still it was very funny and the atmosphere was also great because sooo many people wanted to see him, the hall was really packed. Pikotaro was singing PPAP, Orange Juice, Neon Sunglasses and PPAP Japan Expo Version. The guy sitting next to me even brought a real apple, pineapple and pen to the performance haha.

Day 3
On Friday morning I went to the Japan Expo again and met with my friend Karin there. We went to the Sailor Moon booth again to buy everything we didn't owned yet haha. Then we walked around a little but decided soon to leave Japan Expo because I already had seen everything I wanted.

So we went back to Paris and first visited Angelic Pretty where I bought the exclusive Paris clear file set. Afterwards we went to a kawaii thrift store and then to Princess Crêpe. It was very delicious like always!

Then we visited Sephora because they had a really good sale on Tony Moly (korean brand), Too Faced and other brands. But since we didn't had a lot to do we decided to make a tour through Paris and visit several Sephora stores xD. We could make really good bargains, I paid 22,40€ for the famous Too Faced Chocolate palette and another 20€ for all my Tony Moly products!

In the evening we wanted to eat something asian for dinner. While searching for a restaurant we even saw RinRin Doll with several japanese girls, but we didn't wanted to annoy her so we didn't approached her. We couldn't really decide which restaurant to take, so we just tried our luck with a korean one and it turned out amazing! We both ordered Bibimbab with Bulgogi meat and everything was so delicious!

Day 4
On Saturday I met with Karin in front of the AP store again. On one side I wanted to take a look at the Lucky Packs, but on the other side I also wanted to say Hello to some people \(^o^)/. This year the Lucky Packs weren't really good for me (too expensive) but I still wanted to go inside to take a look at them again, maybe they looked better irl than on the internet? Since Karin was early she gave me her No.6 for entering hehe. But the Lucky Packs were still too expensive for me so I didn't bought anything and left the store empty-handed. I think some girls were talking about me that I didn't bought anything? But there weren't many people anyway so it wasn't any disadvantage if you didn't had a number...

Then we went to eat lunch at my favorite café/restaurant/bakery: Aki. I think many Lolitas love it there hehe. I bought a spicy Karaage Don and a Matcha Latte. Like always it was sooo delicious.

Afterwards be bought ourselfs a Sakura lemonade and sat a little outside K-Mart. Then I had the idea to visit Vivienne Westwood as I have never visited any store of them so far. It's such an iconic brand but it didn't really impressed me? Afterwards we went to the Opera to sit on the stairs and enjoy the sun, and ofc I got myself a sunburn because I didn't used my parasol for 15 minutes haha. Then Karin had to take her bus back to Germany and I strolled alone through Paris.

I went shopping for some souvenirs and then I went to eat Kakigori (shaved ice) at Toraya. It's a fancy japanese café and there was even a guest wearing a Kimono haha. It was quite delicious but not as fluffy as I know it and quite pricey (9€).The iced Matcha was delicious but also super expensive (7,50€ ?!).

Day 5
On Sunday I was completely alone and decided to sleep long and start packing. Since I wasn't in the mood for some sightseeing or museum and many things are closed Sundays anyway, I decided to visit the Hello Kitty café again and have brunch there. Again it was quite tasty and it was nice to see all the cute foods around me. When I wanted to pay they told me that foreign EC cards didn't worked that day, and since I didn't had any cash left I got the brunch for free ^^'''''

Then I decided to walk along a loooong street in Paris and look where it takes me. This is what I find so fascinating about Paris, that there are streets that literally take you from one side of Paris to the other side and you just have to walk straight. I ended up at the Lafayette and needed to go to the bathroom, so I entered a smaller Lafayette building and found myself in China haha. Apparently it was a special store just for chinese tourist groups, they even had special waiting rooms for the groups. I was the only non-chinese person in that building D:

I went a little through the different Lafayette stores (I never realized there are several of them) and decided to try the rose bubble tea with cherry bubbles which I saw the other day. It was veeery delicious!

Then it was already time to head back meet my friends for dinner. Our hotel was near a shopping mall with a lot of different restaurants. We decided for indian food and even if the waiters were weird and the prices too expensive, it was very delicous!

Day 6
On Monday we didn't really do anything, we just packed up our stuff and started to drive back home quite early. We also made a quick stop at McDonalds because they have a delicious breakfast food on their menu: pancakes with maple syrup! They are super delicious but unfortunately not available anymore in Germany.

All in all my trip this year to Paris was amazing, also because I could spend it with amazing friends this year.Thank you for reading!

Monday, May 7, 2018

We arrived back in Tokyo in the afternoon and I was craving for Ramen, so we approached the famous Ramen Street in Tokyo station, but there were long lines at every restaurant. I searched for a different restaurant which was about 1 km away, so we walked there with our heavy backpacks, trying to find it for about 10 minutes in the labyrinth of a train station, only to find out that it had an even longer line. Still super hungry we decided to bring our backpacks to the hotel first before searching another Ramen restaurant, and on our way we found one super close to the hotel with no line at all ~_~'''. The Ramen bowl they served was huuuge, with a lot of
toppings and especially a lot of chasu (pork belly slices) [which in my opinion are
the best thing about Ramen].

In the evening we decided
to try our luck again with plum blossoms and visited a temple. And indeed it was full of blooming trees, so beautiful! *o*

On
my last day in Tokyo I met with my japanese penpal Mikako <3. We wanted to
see a Space x Sailor Moon exhibition and went to a space
museum at the Tokyo Dome. In the beginning we entered two different rooms with some projections on the wall and floor. Especially the second room was amazing, it had a huge projection on the floor and they showed a journey through the space, and it felt like you were actually flying though space! Then we wanted to see the Sailor Moon exhibition, but it turned out to be a very small corner with only some posters ^^'''

Afterwards we went to a restaurant for lunch! We decided to eat Monjayaki with karashi (spicy cod roe) and curry flavour. It is similar to Okonomiyaki, but the batter is much more liquid and doesn't really get firm like a pancake, and you eat it directly from the hot plate. We spend around 3 hours at the restaurant and mainly talked about differences in Japan and Germany I think. But then I wanted to meet with my mother again, so we parted our ways. It was really great to meet with Mikako and I'm happy that I also have a friend in Japan <3

On my way back to the hotel I had to cross Akihabara and spontaneously decided to make a stop there and go shopping at Donki for a last few items. Since I also talked about Maid Cafés with my friend, I got in the mood to visit one, and when I saw that the @home Maid Café had a special theme with My Melody, I just had to enter! The maids were sooo cute and I was even lucky to see a performance where the maids were singing and dancing. I also decided to take a set where you could play a game with the maids. It was this crocodile game where you have to press the teeth until the crocodile bites you, and the Maid was really good at acting scared haha. This time I also wasn't the only female guest, there were quite a lot of female guests (maybe because of the My Melody theme?) and some of them were also really fans of the Maids. One of the Maids even was a foreigner!

Afterwards I was hungry and to be honest I enjoyed some alone time, so I decided to not meet with my mother and go to a restaurant alone ^^'''''. I was craving for japanese curry so I searched for the nearest Coco Curry, since I thought that it's a chain restaurant and the curry can't be that bad. However it tasted horrible in my opinion, at least the cheese filled hamburger steak was good ^^''''

On the next morning it was already time to fly back to Germany. We decided that arriving at the airport 1 hour before the flight should be enough, however I underestimated the size of the airport, so in the end we were really rushed, since we also had to drop off the rented pocket wifi at the post office, buy some food, buy a last souvenir and try to get rid of our coins.

As a last thing I want to show you my shopping haul hehe \(*o*)/ Nearly all of my Lolita items were 50%+ off!

Our next destination was Minobu, a small town near Shizuoka. We wanted to stay at a temple ryokan again, and the one we found seemed perfect as online reviews wrote that the owner could speak english, that it would be close to Mount Fuji and that it would have great food.

The only cherry tree we saw during our trip and which greeted us at Minobu station ^o^

On our way to Minobu we took the Fujikawa Express train which had the most amazing view of Mount Fuji ever! It drove really close to Mount Fuji, we had perfect weather (blue sunny sky with barely any clouds), and the train had huge windows! (Unfortunately I didn't took a picture of it because I wanted to enjoy the view and take pictures on the way back, but then the weather was so bad that you could barely see the mountain ;_;).

After arriving at Minobu station, we had to change to a bus which would bring us further up on the Mount Minobu. Then we had to walk up a very steep road to finally reach Kakurinbo, the temple ryokan. Actually it was more of a house where the family of the owner - a monk - lived and where they had some guest rooms. When we arrived, the owner also just arrived by car and quickly showed us around. Indeed he could speak english well, however he was very busy and couldn't stay long. When he asked us if we have any questions, I answered no because I thought I would see him later again (some online
reviews wrote that the owner would explain the dinner to them and gave
them suggestions for sightseeing). However we didn't saw him again
during the rest of our stay, and the family / staff couldn't speak english at all, so we couldn't ask any questions. It was not a problem or anything since we could have used google translator for important things, but I was too shy to ask them anything ^^'''. The family / staff was extremely lovely though, even if we couldn't communicate much, you could feel that they care a lot about their guests!

Cute neko in the garden *o*

It was only 2 hours until dinner time, so we just stayed in the room and waited for it. During this time I could already experience something truly japanese: freezing. Even if Japan is a very developed first world country, there is something that they don't have, and that is insulation and central heating. And in addition to that, the ryokan was a traditional japanese house, meaning the walls and windows were even thinner and air was blowing through every gap. We had a gas heater that could bring the temperature up to 20°C, though since it was gas (you could literally see the gas flame in it) we couldn't run it the whole night, and as soon as we would turn it of, the temperature would go down pretty quickly again. In the morning it was 8°C in our room, and while we did had very thick bed sheets, at some point in the night I might or might not have googled if there would be any free hotel rooms as I didn't wanted to freeze for a second night (our 2nd night was much warmer though since we turned on the heater in the floor and room next to us as well).

But now it was time for the dinner first and OMG it was sooo amazing! It was a traditional japanese meal, everything was homemade and mostly vegetarian. My favorite dish was probably the homemade Natto (usually slimy fermented soy beans, though theirs wasn't slimy at all) with crispy Yuba (soy milk skin that can also be deep fried). Though everything tasted amazing!

In the evening we went to the onsen which was a red wine onsen (but they didn't pured in a bottle of red wine; it was made from some red wine salt). It made your skin really soft.

Even if I barely slept that night I woke up quite early, and usually when you stay at a temple ryokan, you can also attend a morning ceremony at the temple. However we decided against it, because it was freezing cold, and you would have to climb up a mountain in the darkness at 5:30 am, plus we didn't even knew exactly where the temple was. So we waited until breakfast, which was traditional again and also very delicious.

Afterwards we wanted to visit Kuonji, the main temple for the holy mountain Minobu (in buddhism, some mountains are seen as holy and are worshipped by certain buddhist sects). In order to reach it you were supposed to use the
"staircase of enlightment", which had 300 huge, steep and uneven steps.
Surprisingly I wasn't dying at all when I reached the top, I only had
problems with my blood sugar, because it was too early in the morning and my
body is not used to sport xD. On the top was a big temple with
several buildings. It was really beautiful and had an amazing
atmosphere. There was also a monk that was loudly praying with a drum,
and he didn't stop for the whole 3 hours we stayed there! When we entered the buildings, a monk saw us and told us to wait. Then he
ran away as fast as he could! We were confused and thought we did something wrong, but
then he came back with some pamplets in english with information about the temple.

The staircase of enlightment with cedar trees

One side of the temple

It was also possible to drive to the very top of Mount Minobu with a cable car, however I'm afraid of hights and also of cable cars, so only my mom went up there. She told me that there was snow and that you could take a glimse of Mount Fuji!

Then we wanted to leave the temple, but this time we choose a small path next to the stairs. At the bottom is a short walk lined with beautiful huge trees. I was so amazed by them that I felt the urge to hug one :D. Later I read online that these were 1000 year old cedar trees?!

We also were hungry and searched for a restaurant to have lunch. We found one which served traditional soba and udon.

After lunch we wanted to see more temples. Minobu is very small and not
very famous, so there was not a lot of information online about it. On
google maps I saw that there were tons of temples and shrines, but in
reality many were just some statues or tiny houses. In search of something to do we went up and down the one street of the small village so often that we already felt bad and had fear that people would see us and wonder what we were doing there ^^''''. Funnily the village is so small, it has only one street, no supermarket, but tons of Omiyage (souvenir) shops. One of the houses also had a dog on a leash outside with a sign that the dog loves petting. Of course we pet the super cute dog (sorry no picture) *o*

Many houses were decorated with cabbage flowers. I find them very beautiful!

Actually my mom bought some Omiyage from the top of the mountain, so we decided to sit on a bench in the sun and eat the cookies. After a while I was kinda bored and wanted to go back to the ryokan to wait for dinner. However it was much colder inside than outside but we didn't wanted to go down and up the steep hill again, so we stayed and just turned the heater on ^^'''.

On the next day we left the ryokan quite
early in the morning after breakfast, and on our way to the bus station we had a surprising experience: there were monkeys everywhere! I was a little scared at first, but the monkeys run away as soon as they saw us.

Can you find the monkey? *o* (The other ones ran away too fast to snap a picture of them)